Turning good content into great content: reflections on Shared Digital Guides 2023-24
Kat Quatermass reflects on changing ‘good’ content into ‘great’ content and making Guides usable for people with different levels of digital confidence.
Have you ever used one of CAST’s Shared Digital Guides?
You might want to try one if:
- You’re thinking about trying a new digital tool
- You’re not sure you’re getting the most out of a piece of software you are using at the moment
- You’ve got an idea for a new online service, or support system — but you’re not quite sure how to make it work
Thanks to work of several organisations, supported by CAST and Catalyst, there are now over 70 Guides online. They take you step by step through how to deliver a particular digital solution. Each step covers best practice and options. Then it gives an example of how one not-for-profit organisation approached that step.
Read on to find out how we’ve made them as useful and usable as we can or browse Guides on the on the Shared Digital Guides website
Guides that help you reuse technology
Shared Digital Guides started out as Service Recipes in 2020. Their goal is to help the not-for-profit sector reuse technology. We want to save organisations starting from scratch every time they want to do something new. So they’re supposed to be a bit like recipes — the ingredients and steps you need to use a piece of technology effectively for a particular purpose.
We’ve tried several different templates to help organisations create Guides, and tested the results. Its been relatively easy to get to having “good” Guides, that people are pleased exist. But we want to get to having “great” Guides. By ‘great’ we mean Guides that don’t waste your time, and that leave you feeling confident that you have learnt what you expected to learn. We want the Guides to leave you ready to embark on a piece of work. If that’s not possible, we want to give you links to help with your next steps.
To find out more about what we’ve done to achieve this, read Joe Roberson’s blogs.
- Try the blog about usability testing the old site in late 2022.
- Or his blog about testing prototyped changes in Spring 2023.
Features of the Guides to look out for
It should quickly be clear if a Guide is useful to you
Our titles are always in the format Doing X using Y. This should help you decide if you will find a Guide useful. In both the search listings and at the top of every Guide page you also get a short description so you can check if it will cover the things you need.
Key information about costs and technical difficulty are provided up front
You don’t have to wade through the text to find these. Near the top of each Guide you’ll find a section featuring setup costs, ongoing costs, how the technology was set up, and the key software used.
You control how many steps of the Guide you look at
Each Guide is split into about 5- 7 steps. To read about a step, you open it’s expander. This means that even the longer Guides shouldn’t feel as overwhelming when you arrive on the page. It also means you can easily go straight to a small part of a process that you want to look at instead of scanning the whole Guide for it.
You can choose between reading all the best practice, or scrolling to the parts about what the featured organisation did
The Guides are designed to be usable for people with different levels of digital confidence. Sometimes the best practice part of a step may be self-evident for digital leads. The Guide layout makes it easy for you to scroll past to the learning shared by the featured organisation.
We provide options for you to follow up on
Most Guides finish with links to related Guides. That could mean they use the same technology as the Guide you were reading, or that they solve a similar problem using different technology. When a Guide can’t cover the full complexity of a choice that was made, we often provide additional links that explain more.
Understanding our structured approach to the Guides
The current structure of the Guides is a response to two rounds of usability testing. It’s also a response to some wider trends. We know that people working in the not-for-profit sector say they trust information from their peers and colleagues. They want to know how other organisations do things. But when you look at analytics for case study pages on most information and guidance websites, visits tend to be low.
To start with, Service Recipes read more like case studies. They had long introductions, and separate narrative sections for risk, compliance and technology. People said they were interesting, but not always useful.
We think the current “how to” format with embedded examples is a step towards solving both these problems.
And we think that it is on the way to providing ‘great’ content. Content that is actually useful and usable when you visit it.
We think that it is worth our time continuing that journey. That’s because we’re starting to explore the idea that if your content is only ‘good’, it could magnify structural inequalities. To get what you need from ‘good’ content you need:
- Time — to skim over, or read through the unnecessary parts to get to the things you need
- Confidence — to blame the content, not yourself when it doesn’t seem to make sense
- Research skills — to combine several different sources, and reject the bits that don’t seem useful
Who has least access to these things? People who have been disenfranchised or marginalised.
So if we don’t make the effort to make our content great, we could be part of the problem.
Help us keep improving Guides
To continue pushing forward with Guides that work for everyone we need:
- Funding for production costs for the Guides so we can cover more topics and keep the quality high
- A growing community of users to adopt and share the Guides, to feedback when they are useful, and let us know when they are not
- More not-for-profit organisations to step forward to have Guides created about the way they use technology
- To keep an eye on the content editing — especially, not letting expanders trick us into creating long Guides that cover too many technologies in one!
If you’d like to sign up to have a Guide created the next round will be in Autumn 2024. A CAST content editor will call and talk to you about your project, and then write up a draft Guide. You can agree the final version on a second call, or by marking up the document.
To hear about opportunities to contribute and to learn when new Guides are released sign up to the CAST newsletter.
To hear a bit more about where our interest in ‘great’ versus ‘good’ content comes from, watch me present a slide deck of how we turned what were previously Service Recipes into today’s Shared Digital Guides.
